


Of a Pair

by ERNest



Category: Hamlet - Shakespeare, Rosencrantz & Guildenstern are Dead - Stoppard
Genre: Based on the Almeida Theatre production, F/M, Friendship, Identity Issues, M/M, Open Relationships, Queerplatonic Relationships, Science buddies, Theatre, i mean it's ros and guil of COURSE there's identity issues, two friends with wildly different interests who love and respect each other anyway
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-05-15
Updated: 2019-05-15
Packaged: 2020-03-05 16:21:16
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,773
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18832252
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ERNest/pseuds/ERNest
Summary: "They are two sides of the same coin, or, let us say, being as there are so  many of us, the same side of two coins.”-- The Player,Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead, Act IMore than once someone has asked if they’re dating and each looked to the other for guidance. The real answer is no; why should they be when they’re already what they are?





	Of a Pair

    Guildenstern and Rosencrantz have always been of a pair. For as long as she can remember, and before then, he has been a part of her heart and she a part of his mind. More than once someone has asked if they’re dating and each looked to the other for guidance. The real answer is no; why should they be when they’re already what they are? But somehow that’s never felt like the kind of thing you say to just anyone, so invariably the response is a twin shrug, one half lagging just slightly behind the other. Their shoulders do the Wave in miniature, the closest Guildenstern ever gets to a sporting event.

     They are both engineers, though hardly any of their courses overlap. Guildenstern teaches computers how to think, and there is something beautiful in a properly nested line of html or the proof that logic is informing itself. Rosencrantz has little patience for theories and the digital unless he can find some way to put them into motion, and his eyes glaze over when she tries to explain how elegantly each concept flows into the next.

     She, in turn, loves to watch his eyes light up as he sets weights and wires on a collision course or an obstacle course. She rarely understands what she’s supposed to be looking at, though there’s clearly a lot of dedicated work behind each elaborate setup. His face falls with each failure as he laments that he can’t share something he loves with a person he cares about. She offers a bracing hug as she says what she fervently believes: that her presence just does something bizarre and unpredictable to the laws of physics. It’s why she sticks to coding, because she can’t disrupt something as basic and fundamental as math. Apparently.

     But she never stops watching his work and he never stops listening to hers. Even if they leave these demonstrations puzzled and straining to grasp at something out of their spheres, they both know their counterpart is onto something with the potential to be magnificent. But they’d spiral back to each other’s orbits regardless, because they would be of a pair whether they are brilliant or not. Anyway, both of them know the joy and terror of beginning a project in the evening and getting so absorbed in the work that they work long into the night and come out the other side stunned to find the sun has made an appearance.

     Truth be told, she has never found Rosencrantz more beautiful than when he’s working through the remnants of a waking dream, features and gaze somehow softened as he pulls his already scattered thoughts into that common experience called language. She never knows what _she_ looks like after pulling an all-nighter and something in her hesitates to ask the person who knows her best. But from her end, the world breaks down into numbers and functions, finally achieving the mathematical perfection found in the books that assume a system where friction is not a factor; yet a world she finds impossible to touch. It is just the right measure of delirium to let her float through the day without feeling the lack of sleep, before she finds her way home to regain her equilibrium.

\---

     They are a team, but they don’t control each other’s love lives, nor expect a report on every person who has formed a connection. Some encounters she keeps to herself and some she doesn’t, not to seek approval, but to share her joy with someone who will understand. When Rosencrantz comes into their suite beaming about some beautiful boy with inkstained hands, or a person who lent him their coat, she finds his delight contagious and ends up beaming right along with him. He couldn’t possibly be satisfied with just one person to give his love to, and she’s _sure_ she wouldn’t enjoy being the sole repository of all that sunlight, so the system suits them both.

     And then there’s Hamlet… oh, Hamlet. If Rosencrantz and Guildenstern cannot be defined because object and definition are one and the same, then “Rosencrantz and Hamlet” or “Guildenstern and Hamlet” or “Rosencrantz-and-Guildenstern and Hamlet” all lack definition because each set is pulled in a multitude of directions trying to be everything for each other and landing on nothing.

     But before anything can go in many directions, it starts with one. For Guildenstern that direction is down the center aisle and to the left. Whenever she has a choice in the matter she always sits on the left side of the house, which she supposes is something to do with being left-brained. Plus, in traditional mainstream western theater the action tends to drift from left to right, like the pages of a book, like progress, like the future, so from her vantage point she can follow slightly more exits to the wings, and hold onto characters a little longer before they vanish, each time potentially the last. Even Rosencrantz calls this memory-keeping a flight of fancy but she doesn’t care because _someone_ has to do it.

     These themes of memory, logic-driven decisions, and exits given weight seem particularly relevant as she pages through her program for Proof on its closing night. She braces herself for the creation and subsequent destruction of a world and a mind, and even then she is not prepared, and weeps steadfastly through the second act. Afterwards, an assistant stage manager whose name she doesn’t know invites her along to the cast party and she figures, why not? There, her eye is drawn to a gaudy striped couch and the youth upon it, notable for his stillness. In a room full of furious debriefing about the run that just finished, the contrast is intriguing and she finds it hard to look away from it. How he’s not constantly surrounded by the curious she doesn’t know, but it leaves an opening to try to find her way closer to him.

     She sits at the opposite end of the couch and picks at the gold thread outlining a fleur-de-lis she hadn’t noticed from a distance while she tries to follow his gaze way out to No Man’s Land and whatever can command the attention of such a focal point himself. “They move like set pieces,” he murmurs, and that’s how she learns he was on the build crew. Once he gets talking she wonders how he managed to stay so still and silent for all this time. He has so many ideas jostling for space in his head that they have to use his voice to shout over each other and his hands to bring them from spirit to space. He doesn’t pause to volunteer his name or bother to ask hers before they’re making out. It never even occurs to her until much later, and even then she doesn’t mind too much because he was just a very interesting figure that she figures she’ll never see again.

     But somehow there’s always another party with another dark corner and glitter transferred from his cheek to hers, coupled with the collaborative remaking of myth. Each time is potentially the last, for he passes from her like a shadow — or the dream of one — each time. Even after they exchange names all she really knows for sure is that they’re both Danish: he acts far too unprincely for her first conclusion to be that he’s _that_ Hamlet. Even so, as far as she knows, she met him first before they meet him again, together, at an undergrad mixer.

     Guildenstern and Rosencrantz are accustomed to keeping an eye on each other so of course she hears his aborted sighs as he watches Hamlet go. He trails after the prince up to a certain point but hangs back without even leaving the room, so she has to trail after _him_ and nudge him with her shoulder. “Go have fun,” she whispers, and all his conflicted faces melt away as he pulls her into a hug and then runs off.

\---

     “Well,” says Guildenstern when Rosencrantz floats into the suite, a smile ever returning to his face. “How did the lord Hamlet receive you?”

     “Ah, most like a gentleman! He speaks so softly,” sighs Rosencrantz as he lays down on their (non-gaudy) couch. “And his touch is soft and sweet, too.”

     Guildenstern bites back her surprise. Every time she’s been with Hamlet it’s been hot and frantic, argument and counterargument flying between them faster even than their kisses, hands and mouths grasping for flesh and false equivalencies, and after a certain point who can tell the difference anymore? So the Princeling is many things, most of them something she needs or has needed, but she would never have thought to call him sweet. She supposes that the circumstances were very different, and contrary to the belief of most of their peers, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are different people. Hamlet is a great observer of human nature so it stands to reason that he’d tailor his own nature to suit the human before him.

     She doesn’t muse out loud, and Rosencrantz is too caught up in his own reverie of recollection to notice her extended silence. Abundant speech and abundant reflection are both common occurrences for both of them, and they’re well used to picking up previously dropped threads of old conversations, so when she breaks the silence all she says is, “I’m glad to see he’s good for you.”

\---

     In time Hamlet gets to know both of them so well that he also knows how tightly they are knit. “You can hardly have one without the other,” he remarks once, and she feels that, for once, she has been seen properly. Someone else might have said those same words derisively, thinking their closeness means they’re the same person, but she has never had to worry that’s what Hamlet’s trying to say. He doesn’t mix them up, at least in her presence, and he’s never shouted the wrong name, even at the height of pleasure.

     He can of course be cruel to one or both of them in the petty thousand ways which tend to go unnoticed by speaker and hearer both, but which add up nonetheless. In this he is not so different from any other lover she’s had, so she cannot hold it against him. And even were he the only person apart from Rosencrantz who matters, she would forgive his careless barbs when he flashes that smile and becomes once more a thing of beauty.

     Together they spin through space, never the same as the moment before, and always a spell about to be broken.


End file.
